It's come to my attention there is some confusion regarding the upcoming WCS Season 3 Qualifier and ACL Online Round 3 merge. It appears people are unclear if there are two separate tournaments or if they are the same. Before I go into depth about everything I understand not everybody has 10 minutes to read. So here is a TL;DR.
ACL Online Round 3 and WCS Season 3 Online Qualifier is the same tournament - they have been merged
Both ACL and WCS seeding points are earned based on results
If the community wants to seperate ACL Online Round 3 and the WCS Season 3 online tournament I am open to the possibility
The only alternative date to move ACL Online Round 3 to is the weekend of 28th/29th June at the expense of a reduced confirmation time (48 hours) for top 16 groups
The longer version:
Earlier this year we announced the four online rounds for ACL in 2014. One of them was Online Round 3 on June 14th/15th. When discussions with Blizzard for Season 3 headed in the direction of having a split online and offline tournament I had to look at the StarCraft calendar and come up with a solution. A solution which had the online tournament played early enough that if people missed out on the seed they still would have sufficient time to plan to fly to the offline tournament (ACL Sydney) if they really wanted the seed. Sufficient time for both ANZ players but also those in SEA and even in the ROOT house in USA or even for mOOnGLaDe in Korea.
When I look at the calendar in the month of June we have the following.
Weekend 1 (31st May - 1st): ACL Brisbane
Weekend 2 (7th - 8th): Available
Weekend 3 (14th - 15th): ACL Online Round 3
Weekend 4 (21st - 22nd): ACL Online Round 4
Weekend 5 (29th - 30th): Available
I thought it would be a bit too much to ask for players to compete in such a prestigious tournament a week after a major LAN (Weekend 2) and then Weekend 5 would leave less than 3 weeks for people to make arrangements for ACL Sydney. Knowing that ACL Sydney was open to all leagues and that seeding for ACL Sydney would be conduced via the ACL Online Rounds and ACL Brisbane, it meant merging the WCS online tournament with ACL Online Round 3 or 4 was a viable option. Again in the interest of providing people the most amount of time to make arrangements for ACL Sydney merging the WCS online tournament with ACL Online Round 3 made the most sense between the two options. This was discussed with Blizzard and signed off by Blizzard HQ.
So with a decision made to have the WCS online tournament merge with ACL Online Round 3 it meant people had sufficient time to fly to ACL Sydney if they missed out on a seed while also not overloading the month of June with qualifiers.
I am open to the idea of moving ACL Online Round 3 to Sunday 29th June if people are wanting to have ACL and WCS be separate events but it would mean that the window the top 16 pros have to confirm their attendance at ACL Sydney will be very small (48 hours instead of a week).
So I guess it's up the community. WCS Qualifier is 100% locked in for June 14th/15th. It is open to all leagues (regardless if ACL Online Round 3 is moved because it has already been announced). You just can decide whether you want ACL Online Round 3 to move. Also note the weekend of June 28th/29th is the only weekend I can offer a change. In the case ACL Online Round 3 is moved, the WCS online tournament will no longer provide ACL points.
I will finalise a decision on the matter Wednesday at 1pm AEST.
I do understand now that its pretty much 2 tournaments into 1 so its easier then running 2 seperate tournaments on 2 different weekends and i would agree to just leave it how it is now.
Due to a lack of significant demand to alter the current situation we will be keeping to original plans in hosting both the ACL Online Round 3 and WCS Online Tournament as one tournament.
Any reason you're doing online round 3 as the wcs spot and not the highest combination of points from both online rounds 3 and 4 to get the wcs spot? I figure that way more people will attend both online rounds and people will care a lot more, as opposed to last time people just forfeited their games once they reached a pretty high stage of the bracket.
Any reason you're doing online round 3 as the wcs spot and not the highest combination of points from both online rounds 3 and 4 to get the wcs spot? I figure that way more people will attend both online rounds and people will care a lot more, as opposed to last time people just forfeited their games once they reached a pretty high stage of the bracket.
WCS is entirely independent of ACL. It just happens that WCS is working closely with ACL for this season. Ultimately next weekend is a WCS Online Tournament as per season 1 and 2, there are just ACL points attached to it as well. Due to the StarCraft calendar of this month it was not feasible to have two online rounds a LAN and a WCS tournament.
EDIT: If WCS was not going to be attached to ACL Sydney I would have just replaced ACL Online Round 3 with WCS Online Tournament and had just one ACL Online Round between Brisbane and Sydney. However as they are somewhat linked it was our belief it would not be unreasonable to merge the two.
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